There were two poles in the boat, and Cavendish and the guide served as ferrymen. Fulk’s horse, who behaved like a fine gentleman, was taken across first, and then Isoult and her pad, and the pad pretended to be restive. They stabled the beasts and found them oats, water, and straw.
Fulk went across with them to bring back the boat.
“Good luck to you, Cavendish. Tell Knollys that we are hermits.”
“May your beard grow, sir. And have a care how you play with that pole in your harness. Not God Almighty could fish you out of the mud if you tumbled overboard in all that gear!”
Cavendish mounted his horse, and Jock shouldered his quarter-staff, and Fulk watched them disappear up the narrow meadow that lost itself in the gloom of the woods.
Then he picked up the pole to ferry back to Isoult.
CHAPTER XXX
She was not there when Fulk turned the boat; the little landing-stage was deserted. Isoult had gone into the house.
He dropped the pole lazily into the shallows, and heard the water prattling at the prow, and as the boat moved over towards the island a surge of emotion rose in him, a sudden wonder, something akin to awe. The long slants of sunlight made blurs of gold about him on the water. The woods seemed fringed with fire. The evening was very strange and very still.
The boat had glided within ten yards of the island when Fulk saw Isoult come out of the timber porch and down through a rose and herb garden to the landing-stage. She had thrown off her cloak and her steel cap and hood, and changed swiftly into a woman—a woman in a grey-blue tunic slashed and edged with green. It left her throat and her forearms bare, and was crossed by a girdle of green leather, where it fitted like a sheath about her hips. Her hair was held in a silver net, falling low over the nape of her neck and over her ears.